Taylor Swift Wins the Presidential Debate (But Other Stuff Happened, Too)

Kamala Harris prepped for Tuesday’s first presidential debate with Donald Trump by participating in mock debates, practicing with a Trump stand-in and using a lit stage to mimic the actual setting. Once the real 90-minute debate began, Harris largely stuck to her game plan: deliver her talking points, draw a contrast with Trump, and let Trump go off. When it was all over, as the last of so-called swing voters were telling their cable-news focus groups how they thought Harris won but they’re still undecided and probably leaning toward Trump, Taylor Swift upstaged it all.

In an Instagram post, Swift wrote that she was voting for Harris and her running mate, Tim Walz “because she fights for the rights and causes I believe need a warrior to champion them. I think she is a steady-handed, gifted leader and I believe we can accomplish so much more in this country if we are led by calm and not chaos.” 

“I’ve done my research, and I’ve made my choice. Your research is all yours to do, and the choice is yours to make,” she added, encouraging people to register to vote, and vote early. She signed her name, and below that “Childless Cat Lady,” a jab at Trump’s running mate, JD Vance. 

It may end up being the most important takeaway from the debate in a presidential election that is essentially tied and going to be decided by a few thousand voters in a few states who have extremely chaotic opinions about politics over this past decade. With those margins, the star of the Super Bowl might have a tiny little edge over a primetime news special on ABC news, two months out from election day.

So we could probably wrap it up there, and just wait to see how this all plays out on November 5th. But this is America, damnit, and we are nothing if not a country that must go through the familiar motions of analyzing this debate as if it matters and pretend nothing at all is broken in our democracy.

This was the first meeting between Trump and Harris, and it was framed as an essential moment for Harris to reintroduce herself to America and draw a contrast with Trump for voters who say they are not familiar with her. She largely did that, mostly by allowing Trump to be Trump. In a lot of ways, the debate really seemed like two separate realities: Harris semi-answered the ABC moderators’ questions, but focused on hitting her key talking points, especially on big issues like abortion and Trump’s unfitness for office. Though her mic was off, Harris effectively used versions of “what the heck is he talking about” facial expressions during Trump’s rambling responses.

And ramble Trump did. He acted how his advisors instructed him to for maybe a few minutes, before basically just delivering Fox News soundbites and MAGA rally excerpts. Trump looked angry, Harris came off like a seasoned prosecutor she is, and Harris ostensibly won. 

Will it change anything? Probably not! But besides Swift, here are the winners and losers (but mostly, it’s all losers) from the first, maybe last, Harris-Trump presidential debate:

The Trump filibuster is undefeated: I’ve never moderated a presidential debate, and I imagine it’s very hard, and probably even harder when you are dealing with a candidate like Donald Trump, whose brain is sometimes a bingo spinner shooting out random phrases. ABC’s David Muir and Linsey Davis tried to redirect or cut off Trump at times, and to fact-check him when he told coherent lies, such as reminding the public that it is always illegal to murder babies, that migrants are not eating pets, and data shows that violent crime is falling.  

But so many times Trump responded to questions with absolute nonsense, and that was kind of that. Here’s an example from a fairly important question Davis asked Trump about how he would end the crisis in Israel and Gaza: 

Davis: President Trump, how would you negotiate with Netanyahu and also Hamas in order to get the hostages out and prevent the killing of more innocent civilians in Gaza?

Trump: If I were president, it would have never started. If I were president, Russia would have ever – I know Putin very well. He would have never – there was no threat of it either, by the way, for four years – have gone into Ukraine and killed millions of people, when you add it up, far worse than people understand what’s going on over there.

But when she mentions Israel, all of a sudden, she hates Israel. She wouldn’t even meet with Netanyahu when he went to Congress to make a very important speech. She refused to be there because she was at a sorority party of hers. She wanted to go to the sorority party. She hates Israel. If she’s president, I believe Israel will not exist within two years from now. And I’ve been pretty good at predictions, and I hope I’m wrong about that one. She hates Israel at the same time. In her own way, she hates the Arab population because the whole place is going to get blown up, Arabs, Jewish people, Israel. Israel will be gone. It would have never happened. 

Iran was broke under Donald Trump. Iran has $300 billion because they took off all the sanctions that I had. Iran had no money for Hamas or Hezbollah or any of the 28 different spheres of terror. And they are spheres of terror, horrible terror. They had no money. It was a big story, and you know it, you covered it very well. Actually, they had no money for terror. They were broke. Now they’re a rich nation, and now what they’re doing is they’re spreading that money around. Look at what’s happening with the Houthis and Yemen. Look at what’s going on in the Middle East. This would have never happened. I will get that settled and fast, and I’ll get the war with Ukraine and Russia ended. If I’m President Elect, I’ll get it done before even becoming president.

Davis: Vice President Harris: He says you hate Israel. 

While it may be fair for Harris to respond to that attack (though she previously had just affirmed Israel’s right to defend itself), we’re just moving on? Trump did not answer the question, talked about Russia and Ukraine, and Iran, which very much was funding terrorism, including Hezbollah and Hamas, during Trump’s administration. His own State Department said so. It is hard to untangle Trump’s soliloquies, but he was president for four years, and he has a pretty extensive foreign policy record on issues like Iran and Israel that is available for scrutiny. Maybe Trump going off like this works against him, but he also manages to say pretty much whatever he wants, and if you were a transgender prison alien beamed from outer space to watch the debate, you might not realize Trump was also once the President of the United States. 

Speaking of, transgender prison aliens, right-wing conspiracies go prime time: Trump claimed that Harris wanted to perform “transgender operations on illegal aliens” in prison. This is not true, whatever it means. Trump also talked about Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio who are eating peoples’ pets. This is a racist conspiracy theory spread on social media, though officials in Springfield say there is no evidence of this. It almost doesn’t matter though, because the debate was a reminder that this election is playing out in entirely different information ecosystems, one where America is an overrun, lawless hellhole, and the other which tries to convince people that it’s not true. It’s easy to dismiss this as ridiculous, but the politics of fear derail actual policy discussions on humane solutions on vital subjects like migration. 

JD Vance can’t catch a break: Vance recently argued that Trump would veto a national abortion ban, which is a thing Trump doesn’t want to commit to because he’s trying to walk a careful line on abortion – giving the impression that he’s not anti-abortion rights, while also shoring up his evangelical support. When asked about Vance’s comments in the debate, Trump responded: “Well, I didn’t discuss it with JD, in all fairness. JD, and I don’t mind if he has a certain view, but I think he was speaking for me, but I really didn’t.” Then just when he thought everyone had moved on, he was blindsided by the Swift “Childless Cat Lady” sign off. Tough night. 

The foreign policy discussions were a mess: Harris sought to tout her foreign policy experience and contrast herself with Trump. She pointed out U.S. military leaders, including those who have worked with him, have called Trump a disgrace. “That is why we understand that we have to have a president who is not consistently weak and wrong on national security,” Harris said. Trump criticized the chaos under the Biden administration, and said it wouldn’t have happened under him, while name-dropping people like Hungary’s illiberal prime minister Viktor Orbán. 

But the actual debate on foreign policy didn’t offer very much. Harris made some strong commitments to NATO and Ukraine that would assure allies, while Trump reignited the old anxieties in Europe about his approach to NATO, Ukraine, and Vladimir Putin. Trump mentioned the threat of nuclear war, and said “nobody ever talks about” Putin having nuclear weapons, which is not true, and the fear of nuclear escalation has guided U.S. and European foreign policy on Ukraine assistance.

But there was no mention of Russia’s tightening relationship with China, and besides a little discussion about tariffs at the opening of the debate, China barely came up – nothing on America’s policy in the Indo-Pacific, how America should handle competition with China. On Afghanistan, the candidates discussed the botched withdrawal, and Trump talked about his calls with the Taliban leader “Abdul” (Hibatullah Akhundzada has led the Taliban since 2016, although a top Taliban leader, Abdul Ghani Baradar, was one of the group’s U.S. negotiators). Neither candidate mentioned the U.S.’s current policy toward Afghanistan, a country facing an incredible humanitarian and economic crisis post-U.S. withdrawal.  

Both candidates were asked about their policies on Israel and Gaza, but neither were really pressed – Trump didn’t offer one, and Harris reiterated her calls for a ceasefire and two-state solution. This is a year when America’s electorate is paying attention to foreign policy because of Israel’s war in Gaza. There were a fair number of questions on foreign policy, but most of the candidates’ answers looked backwards instead of offering clarity on what might come next.